It’s 2018. Hell’s jubilee. Fifty years since “The Year Everything Happened” and a century since the last year of the First World War.
Yeah, some good things took place in those years. World War I DID, for the most part end (well, outside of Russia and Turkey), and fifty years later, three guys DID orbit the Moon. But for the most part, everything else sucked.
Let’s look at 1968 first. The year started out with North Korea grabbing the USS Pueblo. Then there was the Tet offensive, followed by Eugene McCarthy almost winning the New Hampshire Primary. Yeah, I know that LBJ was really unpopular at this point in his administration, and his perceived loss there led to Bobby Kennedy’s fatal candidacy and the president’s withdrawal from the race, but were those good things? NO!!!!!
Bobby Kennedy only won four primaries in ’68 and only one of them was the least bit consequential. He was five hundred delegates behind Hubert Humphrey under the rules at the time, and would never have won the nomination. The NY Democratic primary didn’t have any RFK delegates on the ballot, and LBJ, Who hated his guts, had a great deal of influence. Plus, the future Chicago 8 protest leaders were going to have their marches anyway, so the riot was pre-ordained.
Plus Hubert Humphrey was as close to a saint as any Democratic nominee in the history of the party. He would have been a great president. He might have won had not Tricky Dick Nixon committed treason. It was the left who made sure Hubert lost in order to punish the evil Americans.
What a waste!!!!
Then there was the Mexico City Olympics. Do you know how many people DIED in the riots? While the exact death toll of the Tlatelolco massacre remains unknown, hundreds of people were killed and over a thousand injured.
The Mexican government covered it up and in 2007 a mass grave was found. Ik. This is not meant to forget poor Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, who was banned for being on the same platform as the two guys who did the black power salute. They got in big trouble too.
People like to call 1968 the year of revolution. Failed Revolution.
Czechoslovakia’s glorious spring was wrecked by Soviet tanks, and France’s May turned out to be a tremendous waste of time and the Conservatives won a great victory.
There were protests in Poland that resulted in an “anti-Zionist” pogrom. The Troubles in Northern Ireland started, there were riots in Spain which led to nothing, Sweden that led to nothing, Germany which led to nothing…. well not nothing: people did DIE.
The only successful revolution was Saddam Hussein’s uncle coming to power. Worse than useless, that.
Then there was the murder of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed. The man was beginning to lose influence at the time.
On the other hand, there was lots of good music coming out. Then there was Apollo 8. That was magnificent.
There was also the 50th Armistice Day.
Armistice Day 1918, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month can be considered good, I guess. But think about this for a minute: They knew that the Armistice was already agreed to at least 48 hours before. The French commander in chief, Marshall Foch, had ordered a number of suicidal attacks on the 10th and even worse, on the morning of the 11th. Officially over 10,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing
That included thirty-five hundred American casualties, and 863 Commonwealth deaths. They died for NOTHING. Disgusting.
Of course prior to that, it was WWI as usual, the biggest mistake of the 20th century, if not the entire second millennium AD. The first Americans to die had done so in November of 1917 and over the following year, as many people died as did in Vietnam or Korea. In fact, if you include those who died of their wounds within that same time, or of battle related disease, that’s 116,708 American military personnel who died.
There was a race riot in Philadelphia in the summer of 1918. We mustn’t forget that, nope. Innocent African Americans were killed…. and oh yeah, there was that Killer Flu pandemic. That one killed anywhere between 50 to 100 million people, more in sheer numbers than the Black plague of the 14th century.
But we did get to the Moon….